Word: viruses
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...improved way to treat influenza. Researchers at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have collaborated to test an antibody-based therapy for flu. Specifically, they tested antibodies that target core, conserved regions of the virus that do not mutate as readily as other parts. That's a little like attacking the virus's operating system instead of its software. Go after such primal programming, and the bug has less of a chance of mutating its way to resistance - and the vaccine may even have a chance...
Current flu vaccines are rejiggered every year in an attempt to keep up with rapidly adapting influenza strains. This immunological arms race is necessary because the viruses are very good at setting traps for the vaccines. The immune system is calibrated to crank out antibodies in response to the proteins it sees in the greatest quantities. Over the ages, the flu virus has thus evolved a shape like a bobble-head doll, and it covers the head portion with proteins it can easily change or do without. The vaccine targets these ever changing spots, and by the time the next...
...chimpanzees are also reservoirs of disease and can pass along infections like yellow fever, monkey pox and the Marburg virus to their human keepers...
...Khmer Rouge killed nearly two million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979, spreading like a virus from the jungles until they controlled the entire country, only to systematically dismantle and destroy it in the name of a Communist agrarian ideal. Today, more than 30 years after Vietnamese soldiers removed the Khmer Rouge from power, the first genocide trials will start - a bittersweet note of progress in an impoverished nation still struggling to rehabilitate its crippled economic and human resources...
...Ramping up preventive measures may increasingly be a matter of life and death. Since bird flu re-emerged in 2003, 254 people in 15 countries have died of it. Researchers fear that other crises like global warming and the global recession have crowded the virus out of the news. But the disease survives - in the limelight or out of it. "The point is, this virus has not disappeared at all," says Malik Peiris, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. "It kind of dropped off the radar screen of media attention, but the virus itself has increased its spread...